Fuel costs are a significant factor in operating airplanes. The fuel consumption rates of individual airplanes can vary, even among aircraft of the same model and using the same model engines. Determining the actual fuel consumption efficiency of individual airplanes can be difficult due to the various factors that can affect fuel consumption such as, for example, environmental wind direction and speed, temperature, altitude, etc. Many of these factors are dynamic and change during flight.
One approach to determining fuel consumption rates is to manually track fuel consumed at the end of each flight. However, this approach does not track the other factors mentioned above. This approach could be modified to manually track the other factors, but the burden on the airplane flight crew would be significant (Note: The workload of the flight crew may be such that they do not have the opportunity to manually record this data. Some of this data is not immediately available to the flight crew) and may make such an approach impractical. Although some shortcomings of conventional systems are discussed, this background information is not intended to identify problems that must be addressed by the claimed subject matter.